Friday, November 10th, was an important day for the music industry and streaming services. That day at midnight Taylor Swift released “reputation,” her sixth studio album. And like everyone was expecting, the sales numbers were astonishing. On just the first day of its release the album sold over 700,000 copies, and by the following Friday Swift sold over two million copies of her new album. The album’s lead single “Look What You Made Me Do” has been streamed over 250 million times on Spotify, and “reputation” has officially been claimed the most popular album in the US of 2017 so far. These statistics reveal once again the magnitude of Swift’s influence on pop culture and the American youth, and on this platform she has the power from now until the end of her career to spread any message she’d like, whether personal, philosophical, or socio-political.

Swift’s new album gave her the perfect opportunity to speak her mind. During the year she spent under the radar and away from the press much has been going on in America. From the Trump election, to the exposure of sexual predators in Hollywood and Congress, to the rallies in Charlottesville, many issues that should matter to Swift have been very prevalent in the last year and are still popular topics of debate and discussion. Swift, as a self-proclaimed liberal and feminist, had a great opportunity to throw in her two cents and speak to her fans about important issues they should be paying attention to.

However, just like she has been doing, Swift decided to stay quiet on this. Despite being a self-proclaimed feminist, Swift decided to choose escapism over politics on “Reputation.” For some strange reason she stayed quiet during election season last year, and she chooses to stay silent on this album once again. As someone who is biased against Swift and is a supporter of Kanye West in his ongoing feud with her, I knew I would be skeptical about the album’s quality. However, I decided to take an hour of my time to listen to all of the songs and hope for even a tiny shift in the subject matter of her music, but “reputation” is just more of the same. Swift claims on the album’s lead single “Look What You Made Me Do” that the old Taylor is dead, but “reputation” is actually just keeping the old Taylor Swift alive.

The album kicks off with its second single, entitled “...Ready For It?” The track’s name seems promising, as it indicates a sudden new beginning, and perhaps even a new style for Taylor Swift. However, the production of the track is disorganized and inconsistent, much like “Look What You Made Me Do.” Other than that the entire song is about Swift’s excitement surrounding her new boyfriend Joe Alwyn. The second song on the album, “End Game,” is also about Alwyn, and even though she does mention her enemies and feuds in the song, she is not talking about any of them specifically. Instead, she makes the entire song about her.

The album then moves to the third track “I Did Something Bad,” a song about her past relationship with Tom Hiddleston. She portrays Hiddleston as manipulative and as someone who used their relationship for more attention from the media. This continues the trend of Swift portraying herself as the victim of a past relationship of hers while never really embracing her own capability of feeling empowered. And, once again, the song is all about her.

The next song on the album, however, is yet another return to hearing about her infatuation with Joe Alwyn. While the song does contain a few clever lyrics like “I once was poison ivy, but now I’m your daisy,” in which she alludes to flowers and “The Great Gatsby” at the same time, the subject matter of the song is more of the same. She continues to talk about relationships in the fifth song on the album “Delicate,” in which she discusses dating while getting more and more media attention. At this point, all of the songs on the album are about her love life and none about anything relevant to anything outside of it.

Next comes the debut single from the album “Look What You Made Me Do.” Despite being an absolute mess in terms of production, it is to me the most interesting song lyrically on the album. Without name-dropping anyone she alludes to her feuds with both Kanye West and Katy Perry as she mentions the “tilted stage” of Kanye’s Saint Pablo Tour and Katy Perry’s Super Bowl performance in 2015. She talks about being hopelessly dragged into the “snake” narrative and how the media portrays her negatively on purpose so media stations could profit off of her feuds. Hence the title of the song “Look What You Made Me Do,” as she now conforms to the snake narrative she’s been pushed into. While the lyrics are incredibly repetitive, I do grant the song its deserved place on the album due to subject matter, as it shows a different side of Swift that so far hasn’t come through that much in her music. However, her predicament with the media still could have been avoided if she never made such a big deal out of her personal life in a plethora of songs in the first place.

The seventh song on the album is called “So It Goes…”, and it once again marks a return for Swift to talking about loving someone. What promised to be a shift in content for Swift’s music in the previous song is entirely erased by the time this song plays on the album. “So It Goes…” does not even mark the halfway point of the album and is the sixth song now that has the same structure and subject matter on the album. The repetitiveness continues on the album’s eighth track “Gorgeous,” another song about Joe Alwyn with the hilariously awful lyric “‘cause look at your face.”

The ninth song on “reputation” is “Getaway Car,” a song about how Swift’s past relationship with Tom Hiddleston was doomed from the start. While the metaphor of a getaway car in the song is cleverly woven in, the song’s content is still more of the same. At this point as I listened to the album it occurred to me that Swift is all about fan service in her music. Because her fans pay so much attention to her love life, she is writing all of her songs about it. She is conforming to the image that the public has of her, and it is not at all helping the credibility of the voice she can use to talk about other issues.

The next song on the album, “King of My Heart,” has an interesting premise. Swift wanted every section of the song to sound like another phase in a relationship, with a strong buildup to the song’s chorus, which served to represent the honeymoon phase of her relationship with Joe Alwyn. She talks about having found peace and happiness in her time outside of the spotlight as she is enjoying a relationship without pretense and materialism. While I do give the song its spot on the album, as it has a great concept, Swift gives the song very little lyrical depth and talks about more of the same, just like on the next song on the album, “Dancing With Our Hands Tied.”

The next song on the album, however, does mark a slight shift in content for Swift’s music. Entitled “Dress,” the song contains lyrics that reveal how Swift is embracing her sexuality a lot more in her music and is appreciating her boyfriend Joe Alwyn for seeing “the truth” in her despite all of the negative attention she has had from the media in recent years. The next song “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things” emits a similar sentiment of gratitude towards her friends and family as Swift also sarcastically addresses the media and Kanye West. While the content is similar to “Look What You Made Me Do,” I did appreciate the shift in Swift’s music that was there for these two songs.

The next song on the album, “Call It What You Want,” describes Swift’s emotional state from the time she started working on the album to now. It explains why she took her long break from the press and from performances, and how during that break she was doing better than she ever was since she got famous. Though it is always fair to take a break when needed, Swift could still have made her opinions on the actions of the Trump Administration or other American political issues known last year through platforms like Twitter and Instagram, on which she has millions of followers.

The last song on the album, “New Year’s Day,” is a good song to end with, as it uses the turn of the year as a metaphor for holding fast to both good and bad memories and the people who are here for you when you start anew. This song also deserves its spot on the album for me, and it was actually the one I enjoyed listening to the most.

From her new album, I could conclude that Taylor Swift plays her politics very safely. She always keeps the focus on her own life and never really goes outside of it to comment on society and institutions in America. She even utilizes that philosophy in her personal life, as most of the charity work she does outside of her music is about fan service and not really for any other particular cause. Swift’s new album, therefore, brings nothing new to the table for her and is, just like her charity work and other discography, filled with more songs for fan service.

This, to me, makes her no better in her music genre than the mumble rap artists in their music genre who use trap beats and mediocre lyrics to give their fans bangers to play at clubs and parties. Regardless of the lack of profundity in Swift’s music, though, her platform and fan base continue to grow, giving her more and more influence in modern society. Hopefully one day she will use it to speak out against injustice or to throw in her two cents on a political issue, but for now, she continues to relish in escapism and celebrity culture.